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A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

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Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#21

Post by mason240 »

amelius wrote: post #16
duncanawoods wrote: post #7

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its c…

> I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. You mean, like the "internet"?

No, this even better because it means devs would yet another group middle man to pay off just get their content to users.

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#22

Post by raphael_o »

prawn wrote: post #20
themartorana wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I agree entirely on the press thing - although my experiences are from owning a mobile game company, not a mobile app company. For games, online press is great to start to be recognized within the community of peer groups/companies, but has never moved the needle for us, user-wise. We haven't been featured either, but that's made things harder on us. Getting featured is still huge for visibility. We're p…

What has moved the needle for you? We had a dev relations contact and got featured worldwide with Hexiled, then a smaller feature later when we added more language support. I argue with my dev partner about press - I think the best tactic is more decent apps in the store trying to get a home-run feature by honing the app style, rather than begging little app reviewers for coverage. I think if your feature gives your…

Totally agree with that. The key with the App Store is to get a perfect storm of PR and feature to rise above the noise at least for a few hours/days. Then it's up to the product. Without this storm, even a good product (unless it has an immediately high viral coefficient) risk oblivion.

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#23

Post by raphael_o »

mromanuk wrote: post #8
irl_zebra wrote: post #4

Those animated gifs throughout the article were awful. But as for the substance, does it really take knowing people on the inside to have a successful app these days? That seems surprising.

> you need a relationship with someone in the Cupertino saloon. That is no advice at all, just a confirmation of how biased the app stores are. All the big guys can do that. How is supposed a small indie dev, across the world can success at this, now?

Look - it's really what business comes down to. Most of what seems to happen organically was actually facilitated by creating and maintaining relationships. But that's not the main point I was trying to make, rather that as developers, we need to understand the mindset of the team behind it. They think of themselves as store managers and they want to bring the apps that will do well with their users above revenue. Another point to seriously consider which I didn't incorporate in this post is that both Apple and Google will push forward apps that make use of their latest APIs in a way that they approve of, to serve as examples to other developers and increase traction of the new OS features (example: material design, Wear SDK, Apple Watch, etc.)

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#24

Post by Aqua_Geek »

duncanawoods wrote: post #7

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its c…

There's nothing stopping anybody from doing this. Apple offers a DB dump of the store's content (including music). You could build a curation platform on top of that. They do, indeed, offer a referral fee for iTunes purchases.

I'm actually currently working on such a setup.

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#25

Post by raphael_o »

Zigurd wrote: post #11

There is a lot of good experience presented in that article. But there is one place where they screwed up: It's easy to make apps for Android that scale up to tablet-sized screens. Failing to do that isn't Google's fault, and whinging about Google's preference to feature apps that run on tablets is unhelpful. Especially so since they previous, correctly, decided to build an Android design from scratch. If you do that…

You have a point here. A lot has been done in the Android framework to enable developers to build app that will scale up and down elegantly. However, keep in mind that there is more than supporting the physical form factor to it. To build for tablets vs phone is a different product mindset, with different goals and user experience. I don't expect people to open BillGuard every day on their tablet, rather to take their time on weekends to go deeper into the more advanced tools for example. Since the app is used differently, the UX has to be thought through specifically to take advantage of the specific platform you're building for.

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#26

Post by minthd »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #24
duncanawoods wrote: post #7

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its c…

There's nothing stopping anybody from doing this. Apple offers a DB dump of the store's content (including music). You could build a curation platform on top of that. They do, indeed, offer a referral fee for iTunes purchases. I'm actually currently working on such a setup.

How much is that referal fee ?

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#27

Post by softdev12 »

tempodox wrote: post #12
duncanawoods wrote: post #7

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its c…

I don't know about Google, but I can't believe how Apple, the “ design is how it works ” shop can leave such a gaping hole in a place where it conspicuously matters. Every casual AppStore visitor immediately realises that they have no chance in hell of finding anything. First Apple boasts how many million apps they have on the store, then they make 99%+ of it unreachable. Bummer.

I also find it extremely misleading when the stores quote statistics such as "over 93 percent of all ios apps have been downloaded every month" as proof that people are finding the apps they want. What they don't disclose is that the majority of these downloads are probably just 1 time downloads by the app creator on their own device.

http://www.padgadget.com/2013/06/10/50-billion-apps-download...

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#28

Post by dazzla »

IMHO most of the success was due to being featured. Being featured was mainly due to having contacts at Apple and Google. Having contacts is out of reach for most developers. There are only so many developers Apple and Google can have a relationship with and there are only so many apps that can be featured.

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#29

Post by Vespasian »

minthd wrote: post #19
duncanawoods wrote: post #7

I wish Apple/Google/MS would realise that they could stop operating an App Store and start running an App Mall instead. Inside their Mall, different third party stores could focus on different niches and demographics with totally different criteria for including and rating apps with different UX to browse and discover products. Some could use expert reviews, some user reviews, others taste based recommedations. Its c…

On android there are plenty of app discovery apps. But considering the fact that most users only download a fixed set of 10-20 apps , i wonder if most users care about app discovery or is it just a developer problem, at least in the short term. Maybe there's no need. Or maybe the real problem isn't app discovery - but a problem of managing more than 20 apps on a phone and remembering to use them in the right context.

That is exactly the feeling I have. I rarely install new apps and of those few survive my semiregular uninstall marathons whenever the phone feels cluttered. The actual number of persistent apps is surprisingly little and less than 15 I use on a daily basis.

It might be a personal preference but "browsing" apps in the store isn't something I do at all. Most installs come from directed searches after reading reviews online, buying new Hardware (e.g. pulsemeter) or subscribing to a new service (e.g. spotify and friends).

EDIT: Simply being available in a store is definitely not enough to be found. Get a good webpage show the benefit (most apps are struggeling here ;) ) and give me a chance to try it out without much hassle

Re: A Developer’s Guide to the Wild West of App Discovery

#30

Post by hboon »

minthd wrote: post #26
Aqua_Geek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing stopping anybody from doing this. Apple offers a DB dump of the store's content (including music). You could build a curation platform on top of that. They do, indeed, offer a referral fee for iTunes purchases. I'm actually currently working on such a setup.

How much is that referal fee ?

http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/
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